An ongoing review of politics and culture

A few days ago, in response to a post by Jim Manzi, multi-blog super-commenter Freddie wrote:

This is my constant frustration. Conservatives constantly make overtures towards fiscal responsiblity, they constantly claim to want to cut taxes— but they have no specific cuts in spending in mind. And do you know why? Because the conservative rank and file has come to defend Medicare, social security and the prescription medicines benefit as vociferously as liberals do.

This is true in many ways, but the reasons for this problem are at least somewhat more complicated than is often suggested.

Broadly speaking, the American right has three main forces: voters (self explanatory), conservative advocates (encompassing ideological journalists, think-tankers, and other professional and semi-professional advocates of various rightward ideas), and Republicans in government (everything from Congressional representatives and staffers to appointed officials and bureaucrats). The interplay and tension between these groups accounts for much of the dissonance between conservative rhetoric and policy making.

On the one hand, you have voters. Most voters tend to be fairly disengaged from politics, at least in comparison to political professionals. They are rationally ignorant about most policy-making. They have some sense about what they want from the government and what they like in elected officials, and they vote accordingly. Typically, they prefer firmness and certainty of position from their politicians, but they do not always display such characteristics themselves. So it’s not always clear what they stand for, and often enough, there’s a significant, unreconciled gap between ideology and voting preference. Because of their distance and disengagement, as well as their subsequent lack of forceful, coherent advocacy for singular causes and policies, they tend to express their voice in Washington as something of a loud din — always heard, but rarely clear and with few distinguishable, particular notions.

On the other hand, you have the political professional class. This group is fairly small, but it has outsized influence in Washington due to its relative clarity and forcefulness, as well as its proximity to law-making. If the voting public is a loud din, these are a couple of practiced speakers with soapboxes and megaphones.

In the middle are the politicians, at once trying to please the professional advocates who surround them and find ways to satisfy the din. The result, typically, is extremely forceful rhetoric, deployed to please the professionals and the advocates, and relatively weak, compromised action.

Those pointing out the discrepancy between rhetoric and action on the right tend to muddy the lines between these groups. They ignore that the right’s elected officials speak to and for different groups at different times. They point to the megaphones wielded by professional political advocates and the lack of follow through from politicians seeking to appease the voters. The fact of the matter is that most professional advocates who call for drastic reductions in government aren’t in any way attached to the country’s various entitlements and would be glad to cut them substantially. And while it would be nice to think that politicians might someday match their actions with their rhetoric, it seems unlikely given the diversity of the groups they are constantly forced to please. This, rather than pure cynicism, is what results in the sort of contradictions that Freddie’s noticing.

Increasingly, my sense, in broad terms, is that Freddie is right, and that the realities of American politics may mean that fighting for limited government in the strictest sense may be a doomed effort. I think more energy should probably be devoted by the limited government right to figuring out how to work within the larger-government framework we seem to be stuck with for the time being. But I also think that, doomed as they may be, the groups who continue to push for a stringently defined limited government ethos — the sort of full-blooded libertarianism that, yes, I support — serve as a valuable check on the excesses of government. It’s true that they’re responsible for the chasm between policy and action that currently exists on the right, but whatever problems that sometimes brings, I’m convinced the country is better for it.

Leave a Reply

I should say first that I agree with Peter that the tendency for people to endorse small government as a concept but denounce cutting various sudsidies isn’t a matter of dishonesty. I think it’s just a matter of the human tendency to maintain a politics of ideology and a politics of day to day life, and when you aren’t careful they can clash.

I think it’s important to point out how central demographics will come to be to questions of small government. As has been written about ad infinitum, the United States is graying. Senior citizens vote, they have a powerful lobby in the AARP, and many of them rely considerably on entitlements like Medicare and social security. If I’ve read the demographics right, and the ranks of the elderly grow as substantially as it seems they will, and this generation of senior citizens lives longer than any that came before it— I just don’t see how serious challenges to the prescription drug benefit, Medicare or social security can be possible. And those are trillion dollar programs that represent a huge portion of our governmental spending. That’s not to say that we can’t limit government in other ways, but it does mean that there is simply a rather enormous base of government spending that isn’t likely to shrink anytime soon. It seems to me that removing ourselves from our foreign entanglements would be a natural way to save billions of dollars. But the party of small government has rigorously branded itself as a party of military expansion, for good or for bad, so I don’t know how that’s going to happen either.

Assumptions about Medicare and Social Security figure in the long-range planning of households, so you cannot wisely or properly liquidate these programs at this time. You could reconstitute them as vestigial programs to which new recipients would not be admitted beyond a certain date. Social Security, Medicare, and pensions for federal employees amount to around 35% of federal expenditure. Debt service is also resistant to rapid reduction (though less so) and constitutes around 15%. The Congress has discretion over the remainder.

It is regrettable that there is so much emphasis on the scale of federal activity and so little on the degree to which the scope of that activity takes no account the capacity of legislators and inspectorates like the GAO to engage in proper oversight and so little on the degree to which rococo intergovernmental transfers diminish local autonomy and accountability for program failures by scattering operations, funding, and oversight ‘twixt three or four levels of government. The Nixon Administration was the last for which this concern was central, though Ronald Reagan, David Durenburger, and Bruce Babbitt did have proposals for program swaps between federal and parochial authorities.

Simple to solution to Freddie’s initial comment cited: any conservative governor should pretense spending cuts as “universal.” 5% across-the-board cuts in departmental budgets…that’s how a CEO would do it. I completely agree with the left’s critique of Republicans who claim they are fiscally-restrained and small-government oriented then keep Defense spending at incredibly high levels vs. GDP and global benchmarks.

We are living in the hell FDR created. HE is the one who is really to blame for starting us down this path of insanity, which has led to an orgy of rent-seeking, corruption and the entitlement mentality.

Before the New Deal, most Americans gave little if any thought to the federal government, or the president, for that matter.

Think of the irony and insanity — the bigger government becomes, the MORE important it is for us to know what it is doing, and yet, simultaneously more DIFFICULT to know what it is doing.

There are two systems at work in this world. One is the wealth-creating system of logical progress, prosperty, and peace. That system is known as free market capitalism. The other system is the system of politics, which creates corruption, poverty and madness.

America almost escaped this fate. But the Progressive Era and the subsequent fascist agenda of the Democrats took us away from the path of the ultimate fulfillment of the Enlightenment, and toward the path of bureaucratic imperalism, perfected by the Continential Europeans, and now advocated by the parasitic base of the Democrat party.

It is my (non-expert) opinion that professional advocates get a lot less mindspace from elected officials than you believe, but I’m open to correction, and in any event, I agree that the broad dynamics are as you indicate. I think that the “far out” wing of any movement can serve the more moderate elements of the movement (launching plausibly deniable trial-balloons, intellectual R&D, providing a boogeyman – “look, you might not agree with me, but at least I’m not one of THOSE crazies”, etc.).

On one hand, repealing the New Deal is unlikely to happen, and at this point could only be decribed as unconservative. Freddie describes (as usual) some valid facts on the ground. On the other hand, trying to put in place structures that over a long time make its core institutions less relevant (and from a conservative perspective, less destructive) would be a more statesmanlike approach.

In my view, the long-term vision of a life less controlled by the state can only be reconciled with the realities of the current situation by taking a ling enough perspective on the future. (As the New Dealers did brilliantly, by the way).